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”

“Dad.” She sighed as he stepped back, finally releasing her.

His eyes were still huge.

“What’s happened? She allowed you to come visit me?”

Haley shook her head. Her chest felt like it was going to

split in half. What a gruesome thing that would be. How would

she ever hold herself together? Hold everything in? All the

pain and the blood and the sadness? She was lucky it was

Sunday, and she didn’t have classes to go to. But she would.

Tomorrow. The day after. The day after that. Somehow, she

still had to go on. That was her life before. This was her life

now.

It’s different now, because now I know her taste. I know her

touch. I wanted to know so much more. How she sees the

world. I wanted to know so much more than that.

Claire was intense. She was different. She was all

consuming and it had scared Haley at first, but now she was

used to it. She’d lost her fear of Claire. Now she feared a

future without her.

“No. No, she didn’t.” Haley walked past her dad, to the

back of the house, where their own state of the art kitchen

stood. The fridge was built into the cabinets to look like one of

them, but she didn’t walk there. She got down a glass from the

dark cupboard and held it under the tap while she filled it. She

could practically sense her dad wincing behind her. He hated

tap water.

She drank deep and waited for a minute before she turned.

Her dad was trying to figure out what was going on. There was

a storm behind his blue eyes. His brow was creased, and the

wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes looked so much